Turning the farm-to-table movement into a table-to-farm-to-table movement, Outstanding in the Field is a series of events that brings people who love good food to farmers who produce it and chefs who know how to cook it. At tables that seem to stretch a mile across a field or a meadow or a beach at sunset, bread is broken and connections are made.
Jim Denevan, whose brother Bill is an organic grower, did his first Outstanding dinner in a Santa Cruz, California, farm field back in 1999. By 2003, the event was going coast-to-coast (with a crew traveling around in a vintage red-and-white bus), with guest chefs like San Francisco’s Ravi Kapur (of San Francisco’s Liholiho Yacht Club pop-up), Frank Stitt (of Birmingham, Alabama’s, Highlands Bar and Grill), and Gabrielle Hamilton (of New York City’s Prune) doing 90 farm dinners a year. To find an OITF dinner near you, check their events site.